COVID-19 | Why apps might not help track coronavirus patients

A person wears an electronic wrist band, Hong Kong, China March 19. REUTERS

In the last few weeks, several countries, from Israel to Singapore, and Taiwan to Hong Kong, have rolled out different systems to track people infected by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Taiwan, for example, used a mobile phone-based ‘electronic fence’ that used location-tracking technology to ensure that people quarantined with suspected coronavirus infections stayed in a designated place. Hong Kong slapped an electronic wristband on infected people to keep them quarantined.

Both depend on close surveillance and harsh penalties for violations, obviously, raising serious questions about privacy and civil liberties.

Globally, privacy groups have cried foul and pointed out numerous flaws in these systems and those developed by the United Kingdom or European Union (EU). This focus on privacy has driven other countries — and most recently Apple and Google — to labour in the pursuit of a utopian system that could fully protect privacy and also stop infections.

However, few seemed to have paused to consider the question: Can technology truly protect spread of COVID-19? Or even be a good enough aid?

Remember that no app or smartphone yet can run a swab test for COVID-19, or a blood test, or even scan a person’s lungs to identify potential harm caused by the virus. The only thing technology can do right now is warn people if they have been in close proximity to an infected person.

Even to do this, an app such as India’s Aarogya Setu — or an operating system-level tracking jointly proposed by Google and Apple — depends on one of two things.

One, a self-declaration by the user, or as Google terms it, an ‘opt-in’ by users; and two, designation of a user as infected by a health agency.

The first suffers from multiple flaws, including misuse. In the first place, we need a system that will actually keep an infected person quarantined, and away from potential contact with others. So, if a person with an infection is walking around in public places, we may have already failed.

Such apps also lend to abuse by pranksters, and perhaps even criminals. So, an uninfected person could mark themselves as carrying a COVID-19 infection. This would create panic across cities, and bring additional, and unnecessary, burden on the healthcare system.

The second method is for a health agency to designate a person as COVD-19 positive. This raises a number of privacy and civil liberties issues, but in outcomes it is not very different from the first method. For example, a person could be marked COVID-19 positive in an app or a device, but then what?

The solution still lies in keeping the person under quarantine for the period required. If the person can be quarantined, there is no question of he or she spreading the infection, and the smartphone app is pretty much unnecessary. In addition, this method is open to abuse, too. A user designated positive could delete the app or dump the phone itself, and walk around in the absence of other safeguards.

In these circumstances, the only system countries need is one that ensures people infected with the virus are quarantined for the required number of days, and are not walking around in public places. The only systems that will actually work are devices such as wireless bracelets and others used by Singapore and Taiwan, that closely track a user’s location and penalize those who break quarantine.

It might be best to embrace these privacy intrusions, in the absence of true alternatives, but ensure that all such data collected with regard to COVID-19 is destroyed at a finite and not-too-distant moment in time.

Bala Murali Krishna works for a New York-based startup. Views are personal